Zero-downtime (ZDT) upgrade for BMC Helix Innovation Suite and applications

BMC Helix Innovation Suite platform and service management applications such as BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Digital Workplace, BMC Digital Workplace Catalog, and BMC Helix Business Workflows support zero-downtime upgrade. Zero-downtime upgrade ensures that there is no downtime for your production system when BMC performs upgrade of your platform and applications. However, you might observe some issues intermittently, and you should avoid certain operations during the zero downtime upgrade.

Important

You can continue with the transactional user operations during the platform and applications upgrade such as creating tickets, searching tickets, and searching knowledge articles.

Limitations and cautions

You might encounter the following issues while an upgrade is in progress:

Network connections with AR System server might not work for some time.
You might experience slow performance and the following issues intermittently:
- Session timeouts
- UI errors
- RSSO authentication failed error
- 502 Bad Gateway
- Invalid credentials
- HTTPS ERROR 404 Not Found

If you experience these issues, you can perform a refresh or login to the system and retry the operation after some time.

Operations to be avoided during a zero-downtime upgrade

When the zero-downtime upgrade is in progress, make sure you avoid the following operations:

Components	Operations to be avoided
BMC Helix Innovation Suite platform, BMC Helix Innovation Studio applications, and BMC Helix ITSM applications	Performing any administrative operations Deploying and undeploying applications or libraries Creating any approval rules or process or changing any approval configuration Running any utility that performs administrative operations Changing configuration settings by using the Centralized Configuration console Restarting the secondary servers Performing any AR System administrative functions Performing Server Information configurations any time during the upgrade process Making any ranking changes Creating any AR Object Workflows by using Service Level management (SLM) or Business Rule Engine Using any connection that uses the TCP port
BMC Helix ITSM Foundation data	Loading Foundation data Changing Foundation data and onboarding of any user, group, or company
Mid Tier	Preloading or synchronization of Mid Tier cache Manually restarting Mid Tier
BMC Helix CMDB	Accessing the Atrium Core Console Performing BMC Helix CMDB administrative operations
BMC Helix Innovation Studio	Accessing the BMC Helix Innovation Studio Workspace tab as an administrator user Creating and modifying the following definitions in BMC Helix Innovation Studio: Records, Views, Processes, Rules Associations, Named lists Events, Event statistics, Web APIs Documents Chatbots Administration configurations
BMC Helix Business Workflows	Configuring the following tasks: Case Template Configuration changes that involve edits to dynamic data and task flow process change (Create, Update) Task Template Configuration changes that involve edits to dynamic data and automated task process change (Create, Update) Creating and editing an email custom process in an email configuration Editing and copying a line of business view configuration
BMC Digital Workplace	Accessing approval records, Service Request Definition (SRD) and SB approvals in BMC Digital Workplace
BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Service Management	Changing the connector settings in BMC Helix Multi-Cloud Service Management (MCSM) configuration
BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT	Refreshing server cache and metadata Performing any customization Restarting Smart IT during the entire upgrade process
BMC Service Request Management	Creating BMC Service Request Management objects such as processes Importing and exporting Service Request Definitions

Zero-downtime (ZDT) upgrade for BMC Helix Innovation Suite and applications

Limitations and cautions

Operations to be avoided during a zero-downtime upgrade

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